It was the beautifully finished fashion drawing of a model in a sports outfit. The clothes were sketched in exquisite detail.
“This is the only design Sheila Grey had time to finish,” Ellery said. “And it tells us the name Sheila had selected for the collection. Here it is at the bottom: Lady Norma, in block lettering.
“Lady Norma,” Ellery went on swiftly, with no sign of weariness now, “and I point out to you that ‘Norma’ is an anagram of the name of the fifth person who was in a position to know of the Sheila-Ashton rendezvous — the fifth person who, the other four having been eliminated, must have been the blackmailer — and Sheila’s killer. For who else could have known that Ashton McKell visited Sheila Grey? His chauffeur, who dropped him off at the club Wednesday after Wednesday and picked him up again late every Wednesday night, and who was uniquely situated to suspect the nature of those Wednesday excursions — and to verify them. His chauffeur, who somehow became Dane’s predecessor in Sheila’s affections and then murdered her for throwing him over — Dad, watch Ramon!”
Ramon had backed toward the foyer. His skin had turned a putty color; his nostrils were pinched white with surprise, anger, and fear; the line-up of his teeth glittered in his swarthy face. And as Inspector Queen, Dane, and Ashton McKell closed in on him, Ramon seized a heavy chair, flung it at them, and was gone through the apartment door.
The Inspector half caught the chair; part of it banged against Ashton McKell’s legs and tripped him; and Dane tripped over his father. For a moment the three men were an impossible tangle of arms and legs. Then, shouting, the McKells regained their feet and plunged toward the foyer. But Inspector Queen roared, “No! He may be armed! Let him go!” And as they stopped, panting, he said, “He can’t get away. I have detectives posted at every exit of the building. He’ll run straight into their arms.”
Later, over restorative brandy — although Ashton McKell was still too shocked by the revelation to regain his natural florid color — Ellery said, “Yes, Ramon, whose name inspired Sheila Grey to label her new collection Norma, was her last lover.” Out of pity he did not glance at the elder McKell. “It was Ramon whom she dropped when she became interested in you, Dane, and his Spanish pride brought on a homicidal rage.” He forbore to go into the question of Sheila’s taste in men, knowing that part of Ashton’s shock resulted from the fact that his own chauffeur had been sleeping with the woman of his dreams; her lovers had been a heterogeneous lot, and he supposed that the Spaniard — Ramon was handsome in a Mediterranean way — had struck her fancy.
“It was Ramon who came to Sheila’s apartment that night, sneaked into the bedroom to get the revolver he knew was in the night-table drawer — forgive me again, but he had had plenty of opportunity to become acquainted with that bedroom — and, entering Sheila’s workroom, shot her dead as she sat telephoning the police. It was Ramon, of course, who replaced the phone on the cradle, found Sheila’s letter to the police, pocketed it, and escaped.
“He took the letter to use for blackmailing Dane; or, if that failed, as it did, to draw suspicion away from himself by pointing it toward Dane... as it also did.
“He almost got away with it.”
There was very little conversation until someone rapped at the door and Inspector Queen opened it to find Sergeant Velie there, grinning massively.
“You got him, I take it,” the Inspector said.
“We got him, Inspector. He’s quiet now, being a real good boy. You coming downstairs with us?”
“As soon as I get my coat and hat.”
When the door closed on them, as if on signal a babble of exclamations broke out.
“It’s over, it’s over.”
“How can we ever thank you, Mr. Queen?”
“By God, he did it. Mr. Queen — Ellery—”
“This calls for another toast!”
“What a New Year’s gift,” cried Ashton McKell. “Are there the fixings for another toast?”
Three more bottles of champagne were found in the kitchen. Glasses chimed joyously. After a while, Ashton was singing a song of his college youth. (“Oh, we’ll sing of Lydia Pinkham/ And her love for the human race,/ How she makes her Vegetable Compound,/ And the papers publish her face.”) And Lutetia hiccupped ever so slightly and burst into slightly raffish laughter; and Judy danced a jig to the humming by the assembled company of “The Irish Washerwoman.”
And when Ellery said, “I don’t mind telling you that my self-esteem has been restored,” it was Lutetia McKell who cried, “To the armchair detective and his restored self-esteem!” and they drank the toast in the last of the champagne, while Ellery smiled and smiled.
The fact that “the chauffeur done it,” as the man on the street put it, seemed to take the zing out of the Sheila Grey murder case. It was as if the case-hardened mystery buff, reading a new work of fiction, were to follow the red herring through 250 pages and find, on page 251, that the criminal was the butler. Other news began to crowd the Grey case into corners of the front pages, and soon it was being reported on page 6, and beyond.
The McKells dropped out of the news entirely.
It was a wonderful relief. Ashton threw himself back into his business with something very like fury. He had neglected his affairs for a long time, and he was not a man to be satisfied with the work of subordinates. The cocoa bean crop in Ghana, the sugar shipments from Peru, the problem of substitutes for Havana tobacco, the efforts of half a dozen new nations to create merchant marines — he dealt with such matters like a juggler confident of his prowess. Judy was lunching with him at the office these days because of the heavy work-load he piled on her.
Lutetia was happily back at her charity sewing, even (for the first time in two decades) engaging a seamstress to help her with the backlog of illegitimate layettes.
Dane set out to finish his novel, secretly doubting that it would ever be accomplished. It held too many associations for him of the summer. Summer of probing Sheila, dating Sheila, wooing Sheila, loving Sheila... summer of Sheila; he knew it would never be anything else in his mind. Except that it was also the summer of having lost Sheila forever.
Half-heartedly he toyed with the idea of abandoning the novel-in-progress and starting another, but he put it off, promising himself that he would embark on a profitable schedule as soon as the indictment against him was formally dropped. The only word he had had since Ramon’s arrest was that his lawyers had procured an indefinite postponement of his trial, pending the quashing of the indictment. But as the days passed and he heard nothing, he grew irritated.
He phoned police headquarters.
At first Inspector Queen, who sounded peculiar, suggested that he get in touch with the district attorney’s office. Then suddenly he said, “Maybe it’s just as well. Wait, Mr. McKell. As long as you’ve phoned me—”
“Yes?”
“Some questions have come up. Maybe I’d better discuss them with you. I was intending to call you later, but I guess this is as good a time as any.”
“What questions?”
“I’ll tell you what,” the Inspector said. “I’d like my son to be present. Suppose we make it my apartment at two o’clock, all right?”
Dane showed up with his parents and Judy in tow. “I don’t know what this is all about,” he said to the Queens, “but I told my father about it, and he seemed to feel that all of us ought to be present.”
“I don’t know what it’s about, either,” Ellery said, regarding the Inspector with narrowed eyes. “So, Dad, how about laying it on the line?”
Inspector Queen said, “We’ve been questioning this Ramon Alvarez day and night for — it seems to me — an eternity. He’s a funny one.”